“I know—I know,” Hoag said, soothingly, his hand on the child's brow; “the medicine will cool you off after a while.”
“Black' things come to catch Dack—oh, Daddy, don't let 'em—don't let 'em!”
“You was out o' your head,” Hoag heard himself saying, almost cooingly. “It was a bad dream—that's all—a mean, bad dream.”
Then a vague stare of coming unconsciousness crept into the child's eyes and the long lashes drooped to the flushed cheeks. Hoag drew himself erect, held his breath lest his exhaling might waken the child, and crept quietly from the room back to the veranda.
The twilight was thickening over the fields and meadows. The mountains loomed up like sinister monsters against the sky. Clouds of blue smoke from forest fires, far and near, hovered over the valley. The sultry air was laden with the odor of burning twigs, leaves, and underbrush. There was a step on the back porch, and, turning, he saw Mrs. Tilton coming in, bowed between two pails of milk. He went to her as she stood at the kitchen-table straining the warm, fragrant fluid into a brown jar. “What do you think ails the baby?” he inquired. “Looks to me like scarlet fever,” she answered, with the stoicism of her age and sex. “I hain't seen many cases in my time, but from the indications—” He swore under his breath, angry at her for even suggesting such a horrible possibility. “I reckon you don't know much about such things. Wait till the doctor says it's as bad as that before you jump at it so quick.”
“I didn't say I knowed for sure,” Mrs. Tilton flared, resentfully. “But thar's one thing certain, the doctor is worried—I saw that plain enough; he is worried, an' I never would 'a' thought o' scarlet fever if he hadn't said a lot of it was goin' round about.”
“Who's got it?” Hoag demanded, as fiercely as a lawyer browbeating a refractory witness.
“Why, the McKinneys' youngest gal. They sent 'er over here to borrow salt t'other day just before she was took down, an' her an' Jack—”
“I reckon you'll say you let Jack play with 'er next,” Hoag blustered, in the tone of a rough man to a rough man.
“How could we tell?” was the admission, calmly enough made. “She hadn't broke out—she did look sort o' red; but it was a hot day, an' I thought she'd been runnin', as children will do. Jack was playin' in the straw that was cut last week, an' she come by an'—”